Survival of the Richest

There were a couple segments that felt entirely superfluous and sort of outside of the scope of what the book purported to offer but to be honest I was there for the dunking on billionaires (yes, I am a millennial and I think that dunking on Elongated Muskrat is a perfectly fine hobby) and to be comforted that they will, ultimately, not escape the environmental hellscape that we will be entering in great part thanks to them and that's pretty much what I got.

Doug Rushkoff became famous from predicting the 1999 dot com bubble. He's written 20 books. He's a professor at Queens College. He's been heavily involved in critiquing and defending digital culture.

As such, he gets frequently invited by billionaire ghouls to talk about how/where things are going. The billionaire ghouls are finally recognizing that their slash and burn, exponential growth at all costs capitalism is actually not sustainable and will inevitably result in a societal collapse. Therefore, during recent visits, they asked Rushkoff how they can maintain control of their wealth and power post-societal collapse.

This is the textbook definition of “Capitalist Realism” as defined by the titular 2009 book by Mark Fisher: The belief that the world will end before capitalism does and there is no feasible alternative to capitalism.

Instead of using that term, he calls it “the mindset” held by the corporate ghouls destroying the biosphere and grounding us down into dust. I prefer the term “liberal mind prison” as coined by Thought Slime. Any of the 3 terms are valid.

Rushkoff always manages to thoroughly explain the issues we face in this digital age but without outright saying “we gotta burn this whole thing down and start anew”. He's thoroughly critical without coming off as radical. I mark this down as a fault.

His book does not mention the term “capitalist realism”. His solutions are quickly brushed through with minimal explanation. I think this is because he wants to reach a mass audience and doesn't want to scare away too many people with overtly anticapitalist ideologies & nomenclature. This is also a fault.

This is the 2nd book I've read from Douglas Rushkoff. The previous one was “Team Human”, which was also the name of his podcast. I listened to that for a while after finishing the book. The books have very similar themes: technology isn't designed for the betterment of people, they're designed to control us and suck money out of us.

If you've never read a Rushkoff book, pick this one up, as it's good and concise on what he thinks is wrong with the world (spoilers: capitalism) and how to fix it (spoilers: less capitalism). If you've read of his books, I doubt you'll get much out of this one.

I liked it, but it seems like a lot of the same stuff repackaged into a new book thanks to one weird meeting he had with some ghouls. The book is short. I knocked it out in a day. Read it if you've never read one of his books. If you have, just listen to his interview with TrueAnon.